Here is a life essay and a book review that is about being East Indian. The book review deals with racism and sexism.
As an expat currently living in Paris, I thought I’d remind my fellow Canadians how good we have it back home.
My name is Akbar Bashir Ahmad.
My mom told me my name meant “great news.” I later learned that was grammatically incorrect and it didn’t mean what she thought, but the sentiment is a nice one. It wasn’t her fault really, as she didn’t speak Arabic. Even though her mother was from Pakistan, my mom had lived in Canada since the age of 3 and her native tongue is English.
Her adolescence was akin to mine, in that I didn’t really think about colour growing up. My classmates were mostly first-generation kids from Egypt, India, Hong Kong, China, Armenia, the Czech Republic, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Italy – your basic United Nations of cultures.
It wasn’t until university, where I was searching for new groups of friends, it became apparent who I was. My mother always wanted me to hang out with “good Muslims.” The funny thing is I never quite fit in because I wasn’t ethnic enough, either not being religious enough or not speaking Arabic, Punjabi, what have you.
On the other hand, I never fit in with the “white crowd” either as I was just a little too different, a little too ethnic. Eventually, I did find my people that are, to this day, friends for life. But that was my first seed of doubt.
When I finished my studies, I took a year to backpack across Australia, just after the London Tube bombings in 2005. Australia was the first place I truly experienced full-fledged racism.
I was living in the state of Queensland. People started looking at me differently, judging me with their eyes. Old ladies would get up and move if I sat next to them on the bus. A man came up to me on the street, told me to stop, lifted my shirt and said, “Just making sure you’re not wearing a bomb.” I was 24. I laughed because I didn’t know how else to react. I’d never experienced that before.
On another occasion, I joined a group to go hang-gliding. The instructor singled me out: “I don’t want to be that guy, but you’re not going to blow us up or anything?” he said.
I became paranoid. I eventually came back to Canada, but I couldn’t shake the angst. It took me three years before I felt comfortable in my own skin again.
Fast forward a decade and I met my soulmate, and decided to move in with her. She lives in France, a country riddled with terrorist attacks and sociopolitical problems.
I arrived in September, 2016, and you can feel both tension and racism in the air, more than I did in Australia. People here have no problem staring, looking you up and down.
I’ve been trying to find design work in Paris for the past few months with no luck. Finally, one of my cold calls hit and a recruiter messaged me to meet for coffee. It started off well and then he moved on to what I needed to work on. The first was about my portfolio, but the second point floored me.
“Your name: Akbar,” he said. “It’s too ethnic, too Muslim. With everything going on here, people want something more … you know, French; more white. If it’s between you and a François or Gilles, it’ll always be the latter. What I’m trying to say is you’ll never get work in France with this name.”
My heart sank. I felt sadness, hurt and then anger. I was used to being judged by the colour of my skin, but never by my name. “It’s the last thing people shout before they kill, it’s the first thing they’ll see on a paper,” the recruiter continued.
“Naturally, they won’t be drawn to you.”
I was unnerved. I wanted to dig in and tell him off but I kept cool. I was seeing another side of things I hadn’t even considered and it made my head spin.
“But I’m proud of who I am, my name and what it means,” I said. Then I wanted him to feel a little uncomfortable about highlighting this point, so I added: “Back where I come from, we don’t have this problem.”
The meeting eventually ended; I called my girlfriend and couldn’t help but sob. I wanted to go back home to Canada, to safety. I messaged my sister to tell her what happened and she encouraged me to look to leaders that encountered similar obstacles: Barack Hussein Obama, Muhammad Ali. It helped.
It reaffirmed that I am proud of my roots, who I am and my name – something I had so much trouble being comfortable with growing up.
Being judged for your skin colour or name is just plain ignorant.
As Barack’s mother told him, “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”
My name is Akbar. It means “the greatest” and quite honestly, I am great.
To abide others to appease their ignorance and fear will never happen because I know my skin colour and name isn’t what’s wrong, it’s those who judge.
Akbar Ahmad lives in Paris, but grew up in Toronto.
Mar. 4, 2017 "Against the margins": Today I found this book review by Zarqa Nawaz in the Globe and Mail:
Exploring everything from rape culture to racism, Scaachi Koul’s book of essays is wide-ranging, humorous and deeply personal
I first came across Scaachi Koul, the BuzzFeed editor, from her infamous tweet for soliciting pitches from diverse writers: “IF YOU’RE A WHITE MAN UPSET THAT WE ARE LOOKING MOSTLY FOR NON-WHITE NON-MEN I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU GO WRITE FOR MACLEAN’S.”
I laughed, but, unfortunately for Koul, white men did not. When women don’t agree with men, we don’t exhaustively tweet about maiming and murdering them, while describing an imaginative but precarious future for their genitals in 140 characters.
It comes as no surprise when Koul recounts the harrowing days that followed in her new book One Day We’ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter. I block people if they complain about my grammar, but Koul is made of sterner stuff.
Despite trying to reason with her trolls, things spiralled out of control when Twitter’s “fabulous supervillain” Milo Yiannopoulos’s 168,000 followers unleashed the now clichéd torrent of hate and harassment that the site has become problematic for.
(He has since been kicked off Twitter for encouraging this type of vitriol.)
Koul took a mental-health break and deactivated her account. Why such outrage? “We are deeply afraid of making marginalized voices stronger, because we think it makes privileged ones that much weaker,” she writes.
The solution she says, is more then just “fixing” Twitter but “correcting human behaviour.”
Human behaviour is Koul’s specialty. Her wide-ranging book of essays touches upon many subjects – sexism, racism, feminism and culture – in a deeply personal and humorous narrative.
She writes about everything from attending her cousin Sweetu’s nuptials (“There are prison sentences that run shorter than Indian weddings”), to the difficulty of bringing a white boyfriend home after living in sin for so long, to answering the eternal question that has vexed many a U.S. Homeland Security border guard: Why do brown mothers not have fingerprints? They’ve been burned off from a lifetime of making rotis on a hot griddle.
Koul was born and raised in Alberta to Kashmiri parents who immigrated from India. The rupture and pain that immigration causes runs deep through the book. She captures how the anxiety of that rupture instills fear into parents who in turn instill that fear and anxiety into their children.
In a hilarious reversal, she worries about her parents when they finally take a vacation after a decade. They don’t call or text to let their daughter know they’ve arrived safely. She suffers during their entire time away because “how are you supposed to relax when the people who taught you to be afraid of the world, to be alert, to be suspicious, have vanished without a trace.”
As a Canadian of Punjabi heritage, the chapter on being hairy was familiar ground for me. Koul says that Indian ethnicity naturally imparts hair and eyebrows that Western society has designated as “good,” but the rest of our hair doesn’t resemble the “peach fuzz” of blond women, thus it takes our body weight in wax being forced to eliminate all of it.
I, too, have guilt about it all the time spent shaving, waxing and tweezing could have more fruitfully spent getting a PhD or become a leader of a small Nordic country before it succumbs to fascism.
Koul does a deft job of tackling both racism and the patriarchy, but her most powerful writing discusses rape and surveillance culture that’s become so prevalent in our society.
“Surveillance feeds into rape culture more than drinking ever could,” she argues while describing the men in bars who buy women drink after drink waiting until she loses “the language of being able to consent.”
I read the chapter about Koul’s experiences after having her drinks spiked with roofies with clenched hands while willing her to be okay. She argues that women are so used to being watched by men in their everyday lives, that “being surveilled with the intention of assault or rape is practically mundane.”
Her musings on how “our inability to talk about race and its complexities actually means our racism is arguably more insidious” becomes almost prophetic in the era of Donald Trump.
Shadism has coloured Koul’s entire life. She’s “white” in India but “brown” in North America.
As a result, she’s experienced the privilege of her lighter shade in one country: “The world here is built to benefit those with white skin and punish those with dark skin, much like the world at home.”
So how to fix these problems? We need to fix human behaviour, Koul would say, since “these are beliefs and behaviours we inherit from … the people who raised us.”
As I write this review, my Twitter feed is full of news of Jewish cemeteries’ being vandalized, mosques being burned down, brown men being shot in bars.
But I also see people rallying around the world against xenophobia in a way that makes the brown cockles of my heart strum with wonder. In order to overcome racism, it must have a strong light shone on it to illuminate all its ugliness.
Koul does this by bringing her vulnerability, honesty and, of course, wry sense of humour to the discussion. She weaves stories, which through their cultural uniqueness and specificity, become universal and applicable to all.
Writer and filmmaker Zarqa Nawaz is the author of Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, which was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and the creator of Little Mosque on the Prairie.
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